Publications

Higher Expectations Magazine, Spring 2010, Volume 4, Number 1 (pdf)

Higher Expectations Magazine, Spring 2009, Volume 3, Number 1 (pdf)

Higher Expectations Magazine, Winter 2008, Volume 2, Number 1 (pdf)

Higher Expectations Magazine, Fall 2007, Volume 1, Number 1 (pdf)

Articles

The Danger of Theology
Dr. Peter Leithart's 2008 Convocational Address

My assignment is to address the graduate students, but let me begin with a story, a familiar one, found in the gospel of John.

On the Sabbath after the last day of the Feast of Booths, Jesus has an intense debate with Jewish leaders in Herod’s temple, climaxing with Jesus’ declaration, “Before Abraham was, I am.”  The Jews have recently been eager to execute an adulteress. Now they’ve found a new target, a blasphemer, and they search the ground for stones to pelt at Jesus.

As He slips away, Jesus passes a man blind from birth.  He stops, spits on the ground, makes clay to christen the man’s eyes, and sends him off to wash in the pool of Siloam.  When the man returns, he can see but he can’t see Jesus because Jesus is gone.  

Since it’s a Sabbath day, everyone turns to the Pharisees for a legal judgment about what Jesus did.  The Pharisees are in a spot: They’ve already decided Jesus is a sinner who breaks Sabbath, but they can’t deny the man can see.  It takes some ingenuity to run a trial when you start with a predetermined verdict, and all the evidence is against you.

They try to break the man’s dogged adherence to the facts.  When they can’t, they turn to his parents.  Perhaps, they think, the man is a plant, part of a vast Jesus conspiracy.  Alas, the parents are no help.  They’re too afraid of the Pharisees to say Jesus healed their son, but they know he was born blind.  Frustrated, the Pharisees resort to brute power.  They can’t let the man stay.  So long as he is in the synagogue, even if he is only standing silently in a corner praising God for his sight, he’s a continuing witness to Jesus, and an offense to the Pharisees.  Left with nothing substantive, they “revile” the man, accuse him of arrogance for trying to teach them, and impose a confession of faith so they can justify kicking him out of the synagogue. 

While the Pharisees are marching steadily into darkness, the blind man progresses from literal and spiritual blindness through several stages of semi-illumination until he embraces and falls before the Light.  At first, he knows only Jesus’ name.  Under pressure from the Pharisees, he confesses Jesus is a prophet.  After the Pharisees interview his parents, they return for a second round, and in the meantime he’s gotten bolder.  He presents an airtight argument: God doesn’t hear sinners; Jesus performed an unprecedented sign by God’s power; therefore Jesus cannot be a sinner.  Why can’t these well-educated Pharisees see it?  Logic – have they never taken logic?  (“I wonder what they do teach them at these schools.”)  The blind receives more than sight; he’s given deeper and deeper insight. 

With insight comes irony.  He sees through the Pharisees’ bullying and bluster, and he turns into a classical eiron, sarcastically asking the Pharisees if they want to become disciples of Jesus.  The joke’s on them, and we on-looking readers snicker behind the backs of the clumsy Pharisees.  It’s fun to see Jesus stymie them; it’s delicious to see them driven from the field by a mere beggar!

Then we’re brought up short.  How did we come to see these things in this story?  How did we come to laugh at the Pharisees’ expense?  We did it by poring over the text, examining nuances of language, twists in the plot, the rise and fall of different characters.   

We’ve read some articles and commentaries.  We come to these conclusions by examining the text as exegetes and theologians, by listening to other exegetes and theologians.  Then we realize the only exegetes and professional theologians in the story are the Pharisees.  The joke’s on the scribes; but we can only see the joke by becoming scribes.  We thought the joke was on them, but we realize with a start that the joke’s on us. 

Here we get to the grad school moral of my retelling of the story of the blind man, which is equally the story of Pharisees: Formal theological study is one of the most spiritually dangerous endeavors you can take on.

It’s not dangerous for all the romanticized reasons you might think it dangerous.  It’s not dangerous because you’re facing down the world, the flesh, and the devil.  Apart from the very rare Luther or Machen, the world, the flesh, and the devil have more strategic uses of their energies.  The devil knows most theologians can be safely ignored.  It’s not dangerous because you’re in the infantry of the church militant either.  You aren’t.  Theologians and theology students are typically watching from a comfortable window-box high above the field where players stand a real risk of getting hurt.

Studying theology is dangerous because, from what we can see in the Bible, experts in theology are more apt than others to form little smug societies for the enhancement of mutual honor.   Earlier in John’s gospel, Jesus identified the reason for the Jews’ unbelief: “How can you believe, when you receive glory from one another, and you do not seek the glory that is from the one and only God?” (5:44).  The Pharisees read and footnote each other’s books and journal articles, confer honorary degrees on one another, devote themselves to a single-minded pursuit of tenure so they can receive glory from other tenured theologians.  They impose a brutal knowledge regime on their colleagues, ignoring dissenters when they can and excising them when they can’t.  When they run out of arguments, they turn to insults and finally take away the union card.  Don’t think it won’t happen to you.  The greatest danger is for those called to spend their lives studying and teaching theology.  But whatever you plan to do with your degree, your training will tempt you to become a Pharisee.  When some superstitious old woman gently reminds you of some basic truth of the gospel, you’ll be tempted to object, “Yes, but the Greek says. . . .”  When an untrained nobody wants to teach you something, you’ll be tempted to respond Pharisaically, “You want to teach me?”  And if he persists, you’ll be relieved he’s not part of your little club.

The antidote to this temptation is worship.  Jesus repeatedly contrasts the honor that comes from God and the honor that comes from men.  Giving glory to and seeking glory from the Father must be the center of theological study.  If it’s not, theological expertise can only turn rancid.

Seek glory from God; that’s the antidote.  So, give glory to God, and seek it from Him. But we need to know where to find that glory, and the story of the blind man tells us that too.  After Jesus gives instructions to the blind man to wash in Siloam, He disappears from the story.  It’s His longest absence in John’s gospel.  He doesn’t reappear until the man is cast out of the synagogue.  There he sees Jesus for the very first time, and worships.

Unless you’re ready to be cast out of the synagogue, you aren’t ready to study theology.  And you won’t risk being cast out unless you’re convinced that true glory is outside, in the sunlight.  You won’t risk being cast out unless you know you’ll find Jesus, the living Glory of the Father, just over the threshold. Thank you.

A Degree of Difference
by Dr. Peter Leithart, Graduate Studies Dean

The New Saint Andrews M.A. in theology is unlike any other theology program anywhere.  It is a degree of difference.

I have to say that.  I am the Dean, and I was assigned to write this essay.  But it also happens to be true.

In what other theology program do students divide their time between film criticism and the philosopher of science Thomas Kuhn?  At what other school do students debate church-state relations on Monday and puzzle over Christological technicalities or Paul’s rhetoric on Tuesday?  Where else do theology students spend a term reading Shakespeare, another reading literary criticism and philosophy of language, and another studying classics of sociology and cultural anthropology?  What other theology requires students spend their spare time chanting Psalms and serving in the church?  In what other unabashedly Protestant theology course do students read de Lubac and Milbank, Schmemann and Barth, not only to criticize but to learn?  What other theology students are as likely to write about Gerald Manley Hopkins and the architecture of Roman baptisteries as they are about Calvin and the communicatio idiomatum?

Above all, where else can you find a broad curriculum like this integrated by a Trinitarian framework, taught by a faculty committed to the truth of Scripture and the Reformed confessional tradition?

I dare say, Nowhere.

Other theology programs have classes, even specialized degrees, on similar cultural topics.  Down at Fuller, they offer intriguing classes on “visual culture,” and the old Saint Andrews has an impressive Institute for Theology, Imagination, and the Arts.  At NSA, these courses are not electives or part of a special major in “theology and culture.”  They are as central to theology as the biblical and theological courses I teach.

Our degree is billed as a Master’s in “Trinitarian theology and culture,” but more fundamentally we are opposed to the whole idea of “theology and . . .”. We renounce the copulative and all its works and all its ways. 

Time was when “sacred doctrine” covered everything.  Augustine wrote in the interrogative mood and for him every question about everything was a theological question, a prayer directed back to the Creator of all.  Thomas was the greatest philosopher, as well as the greatest theologian, of his time, and he and Augustine are both among the great political theorists of the West.  They didn’t think they were doing “theology and . . . .”  They were just doing theology, studying and teaching sacred Scripture.

“Theology and . . .” programs are a byproduct of modernity, which split theology off from the rest of the academy, hustled it down a dark hallway, and locked it in a basement office with stern warnings to “Stay put” and “Behave.”  Theologians, a meek race by and large, have usually complied, filling long seminars and shelf after shelf of books with monographs on minutiae of Scripture, on historical studies, on the arcane of systematics.  Theologians were never, ever allowed to do was make authoritative “Thus saith the Lord” pronouncements about liberal politics, serial music, Cubism, relativity, or epistemology.  For the most part, they didn’t care to make those pronouncements anyway.

Theologians are beginning to slip out of the basement, and beginning to speak with renewed confidence.  Booklists of every theological publisher these days are filled with studies that apply theological insights to cultural issues.  It is becoming clear to more and more theologians that all theology is theology of culture, cultural theology. 

How, for instance, can anyone hope to become a biblical scholar without some literary sensitivity?  The first half of the Old Testament, after all, is largely narrative, and the second half is largely poetry.  How can a contemporary systematician responsibly write on theological anthropology without knowing something about Freud, and Max Weber, and cultural anthropology? 

On the whole, “theology and. . .” courses and programs are a sign of health.  But few theology programs are designed to handle a robustly cultural theology.  The NSA program is.  That is one of the things that gives our degree a degree of difference.

I teach the old standbys, the biblical and theology courses.  Most days, we sit around the table, Greek Testament open before us, discussing and debating Mark’s or Paul’s grammar, literary artistry, and theology, or teasing out the Christological import of John’s thoroughly Jewish terminology.

This looks like a standard seminary course, and in many ways it is.  Even here, though, the NSA program offers a degree of difference.

The founders of the modern world made sure that theology would stay weak by subdividing theology’s little ghetto.  Divide and conquer has been modernity’s strategy for neutering theology.  In one corner were the Old Testament scholars, and far on the other side were the New Testament, and both were prevented from talking to the systematicians.  Still today, seminaries have divided biblical faculties.  New Testament scholars might know the Greek Bible backward and forward, and especially the scholarly literature on the Greek Bible, but they rarely are bold enough to venture across the border. 

Pre-modern theologians didn’t know there was a border.  Origen, John Chrysostom, Bernard of Clairvaux might start with the Song of Songs, but once they begin they wander everywhere, as their meditations lead them form the gospels to Revelation, then back to Genesis or the book of Samuel.  The Bible, not some tiny segment of it, gave bishops and priests, monks and friars room to stretch their limbs and play in the fields of the Lord.

This too is changing.  New Testament scholars are more and more aware that the New Testament on its own lacks foundation.  Every line of Paul’s letters reverberates with the music of Torah, Psalms, and prophets.  “Theological interpretation” of Scripture is all the rage these days.  No one quite knows what the phrase means, except that the Old Testament is part of the Christian Bible and the story of Jesus.  As the boundary of Old and New breaks down, so do modern ways of reading Scripture.  Typology and allegory are making a comeback, and we at least are glad to see them back.

Most schools and programs are not designed to teach the Bible this way.  Seminaries still keep their Old and New Testament faculties separate.  At NSA, we (once again) repudiate the copulative and all its works and all its pomp.  We don’t study “Old and New.”  The Bible isn’t two books, but one, and so we study it as a single book.

We are tiny, and we just started.  But the NSA program is the only overtly postmillennial program I know of.  For that reason, we do our work in deepest confidence that the God of Abraham will use us to bless the nations until all knees bow to Jesus, Abraham’s seed.  We work in the calm assurance that we can make a difference, a difference without measure, a difference disproportionate to our skill and energy, a difference beyond degree.